CipherLaunch faster
Turn months of hiring into weeks of development. Your roadmap stops waiting for headcount.
Product Engineering Partner for Funded AI Startups
Ship faster.
Ship faster.
Impress investors.
Grow with confidence.
Cipher Solutions becomes an extension of your engineering team - helping funded AI startups deliver roadmap-critical features in weeks, not months, without slowing down to recruit.
Senior engineers only First commit in under 2 weeks NDA-first, you own the IP
Trusted by funded teams at
Vantel AI loopwire Cortexa ARDENT Ferrous quanticore
< 2 wks From kickoff call to first commit
40% Average roadmap acceleration
100% Senior, product-minded engineers
0 Hiring overhead, notice periods, recruiter fees
Why Cipher Why AI startups work
Why AI startups work
with Cipher Solutions
Not code. Not technology. Not developers. What we actually sell is speed - and the certainty that your roadmap will survive contact with reality.
Extend your engineering team
Senior engineers who plug directly into your workflows, rituals, and codebase - not a separate vendor to manage.
Build AI-native products
From LLM integrations and RAG pipelines to AI agents and the scalable backend infrastructure behind them.
Scale confidently
Ship new features without compromising reliability, security, or velocity. Grow usage without growing risk.
The post-raise reality
Sound familiar?
You just raised. Now every month costs money, every delay costs money, and every missed sprint makes investors nervous. You're not short on ideas - you're short on execution capacity.
Your roadmap keeps growing……but hiring takes months.
Your engineers are overloaded……and product deadlines keep slipping.
Investors expect rapid execution……but your team is already at capacity.
AI features are becoming mandatory……but nobody has time to build them.
The model
We integrate like your own engineering team.
Not another agency to manage. Not freelancers to babysit. Senior product engineers who join your company and start removing pressure from day one - inside your Slack, your Jira, and your GitHub.
- Inside your tools Slack, Jira, GitHub, Linear - your engineers won't feel a seam.
- Inside your rituals Standups, sprint planning, retros. We show up like teammates, not vendors.
- Inside your standards Your code review, testing, and CI/CD bar. We raise it where you want us to.
- Accountable to outcomes Weekly demos, transparent reporting, and a definition of done we agree on up front.
Not outsourcing.
Not staff augmentation.
Not a software house.
Not freelancers.
Your Product Engineering Partner.
The Cipher Velocity™ Framework An operating system for shipping -
An operating system for shipping -
not just a promise of speed.
Every engagement runs on Cipher Velocity™: four phases, six operating principles, and a fixed set of deliverables. It is a repeatable system, which is why it keeps producing the same outcome - funded startups shipping months faster.
01
Discovery Call
We map your roadmap, constraints, and definition of done. You talk, we listen - then we tell you exactly how fast we can move.
Day 0 02
Engineering Match
We assemble senior engineers for your exact needs - AI, backend, frontend, mobile, QA - vetted for startup velocity.
Days 2-5 03
Integration
Your new engineers join your Slack, Jira, and GitHub. Same rituals, same standards, guaranteed timezone overlap.
Week 1 04
Continuous Delivery
Weekly releases. Transparent communication. Zero surprises. Scale up or down as your roadmap demands.
OngoingThe principles it runs on
Non-negotiable rules baked into every engagement. This is what makes the outcomes repeatable instead of lucky.
- Senior only. No exceptions. Nobody learns on your dime. Every engineer we place has shipped production software at startups before.
- Your repos, your rituals, day one. Work happens in your tools from the first commit. Nothing lives on our side. Nothing gets thrown over a wall.
- Weekly demos or it didn't happen. Every week ends with something running in front of you. Progress you can show your board, not status updates you have to decode.
- One accountable lead. You never manage individuals. A single engineering lead owns delivery, quality, and communication on our side.
- Async-first, overlap guaranteed. Minimum 4 hours of daily overlap with US time zones, plus written async updates. You are never blocked waiting on us.
- Scale up or down monthly. Roadmap spikes, we add engineers. Priorities change, you scale back. No severance, no sunk hiring costs, no drama.
| Option AHiring in-house | Option BTypical agency | The systemCipher Velocity™ | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Time to first commit | 3-6 months | 4-6 weeks | Under 2 weeks |
| Who you actually get | A gamble on interviews | Mixed teams, juniors billed as mids | Senior-only, with a 2-week fit guarantee |
| Management overhead | You recruit, onboard, retain | You manage the vendor | One accountable lead, weekly demos |
| When priorities change | Severance and sunk costs | Renegotiate the contract | Scale up or down monthly |
| Code & IP | Yours, after ramp-up | Sometimes hostage to the vendor | Your repos, your IP, from day one |
Same budget. Radically different time-to-roadmap. That is the entire point.
What we do
Outcomes, not technologies.
Nobody wakes up wanting custom software. You wake up needing to launch before the runway ends. These are the four ways we make that happen.
Product Engineering
Accelerate product delivery with experienced full-stack teams that own features end-to-end - from spec to production.
Web appsAPIsMobileDevOps
AI Feature Development
Ship the AI capabilities your roadmap demands - and your competitors are already building - without derailing your core team.
LLM integrationRAGAI agentsAutomation
MVP Development
Launch investor-ready products in weeks, on architecture that still holds up after the demo - built to raise on, then to scale on.
8-week buildsDemo-readyScalable foundations
Engineering Team Extension
Scale engineering capacity up or down without permanent hiring, notice periods, or recruiter fees. Plug in leverage, unplug when done.
Start < 2 weeksFlexible scopeNo long contracts
Under the hood
Tools are table stakes. Outcomes are the product.
You assume we know React. You're right. Here's the stack we reach for most:
TypeScriptReactNext.jsNode.jsPythonFastAPIPostgreSQLpgvectorRedisDockerKubernetesTerraformAWSGCPOpenAIAnthropicLangChainVercel
Don't see your stack? If it's modern, we ship in it.
Results
Proof over promises.
We don't title our work "Healthcare App" or "FinTech Platform." We title it by what it did for the business.
40%
Reduction in development time Helped Vantel AI cut development time by 40% in one quarter.
Two senior Cipher engineers embedded into a squad that was drowning in roadmap. Ninety days later, velocity was up 40% and the CTO was back to architecture instead of triage.
AI SaaSSeries A
8 wks
From kickoff to investor demo Delivered Ferrous' investor-ready MVP in 8 weeks.
A seed-stage fintech needed something real in front of investors before the next board meeting. We shipped a production-grade MVP - and the architecture is still what they run on today.
Fintech AISeed
< 2 wks
To a full senior squad Stood up four senior engineers at Ardent Health in 11 days.
Their roadmap outgrew their hiring pipeline the week they closed their round. Four senior engineers were committing code before their first job posting would have gone live.
HealthTechSeries B
Founder testimonials
What founders say after the pressure lifts.
Cipher's engineers were committing to our repo in nine days. Our March board deck had a roadmap we ended up hitting in February. I've stopped thinking of them as a vendor.
Daniel Reeves CEO, Vantel AI - Series A
We spent five months failing to hire two senior ML engineers. Cipher had three shipping in two weeks - and our own team's velocity went up, not down.
Priya Nair CTO, Cortexa - Seed
The weekly demos changed the conversation with our investors. We show progress, not promises. The two-week fit guarantee is why we said yes - the results are why we stayed.
Marco De Santis Co-founder, Loopwire - Series A
FAQ
What could go wrong? Fair questions.
Every founder asks these before working with us. Here are the straight answers.
We already have engineers. Why would we need Cipher?
Exactly the point. We're not replacing your team - we're giving it leverage. Most Series A teams have 9 months of roadmap and 4 months of engineering capacity. We close that gap without the 3-6 month hiring cycle, so your existing team keeps owning the product while we add execution capacity underneath it.
How is this different from outsourcing or staff augmentation?
Outsourcing means throwing specs over a wall. Staff augmentation means renting resumes. We embed as a product engineering partner: we join your rituals, challenge your roadmap when it needs challenging, own features end-to-end, and stay accountable to business outcomes - not tickets closed.
How fast can engineers actually start?
Discovery call this week. Engineers matched in 2-5 days. Committing code inside your repos within two weeks. Compare that to the 3-6 months a senior hire takes - job description, recruiters, interviews, notice period, onboarding, ramp-up.
What if our priorities change or funding slows?
Then you scale down or pause. Need two backend engineers this quarter and none the next? Done. No severance, no sunk hiring costs, no awkward layoffs. Flexibility is the product - permanent headcount can't do that.
Who owns the code and the IP?
You do. 100%, from day one. Every engagement is NDA-first and work-for-hire. Your repos, your infrastructure, your IP. If we part ways, everything stays with you - including documentation.
How do you guarantee seniority and quality?
Senior-only roster, vetted for startup velocity - not just algorithms. We work inside your code review and CI/CD standards, demo weekly, and back it with a two-week fit guarantee: if an engineer isn't raising your bar in the first two weeks, we replace them at no cost.
What does the free Roadmap Acceleration Review include?
A 45-minute working session where we map your roadmap against your real engineering capacity and show you where 4-8 weeks are hiding. You keep the full roadmap document either way - no pitch, no obligation. If we're not a fit, we'll tell you that too.
Will time zones be a problem?
No. We guarantee a minimum of 4 hours of daily overlap with US time zones, plus async-first communication in your tools. Most clients forget we're not in the office down the hall.
Start here The easiest yes
The easiest yes
on your roadmap.
You don't need to commit to an engagement to find out if we're real. Pick a free starting point - we do the work, you keep everything we produce, and you decide what happens next.
Free - most popular
Claim Your Free Review Roadmap Acceleration Review
45 minutes with a senior engineering lead. We map your current roadmap against your real engineering capacity and show you exactly where 4-8 weeks are hiding. You keep the full roadmap document either way.
Engineering Bottleneck Audit
A senior review of your delivery pipeline - where cycles stall, why sprints slip, and the three fixes with the highest leverage. Written report included.
Request the auditAI Readiness Assessment
Where AI actually moves your metrics - and where it's hype. You leave with an architecture sketch and a build plan for your first (or next) AI feature.
Assess my productTeam Velocity Workshop
A half-day working session with your engineering leads. You leave with a 90-day execution plan your whole team actually signs off on.
Book the workshop
No pitch deck. No obligation. If we're not a fit, we'll say so on the call.
Prefer email? hello@ciphersolutions.dev